Treasure Hunters – Peril at the Top of the World

James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein's Peril at the Top of the World is a globe-trotting adventure for 9 year olds about a family of treasure hunters who get blamed for a museum robbery themselves.

What happens

The Kidds find stolen treasure for a living and hand it back to its owners. Bick tells the story. His twin Beck is the artist, big sister Storm has a photographic memory and seventeen-year-old Tommy goes weak at the knees whenever a girl walks past.

It opens in Florence in the middle of the night, with the family squashed into a van waiting for smugglers. Bick and Beck are under strict orders to sit still and observe (you can guess how long that lasts).

The smugglers work for a secret gang of art thieves who call themselves the Enlightened Ones, and the gang likes playing games. Soon a stern museum guard in Russia hands the family an envelope sealed with wax. Inside is a clue.

The very next morning four masterpieces vanish from the Hermitage, the museum next door to their hotel, a Rembrandt among them.

Then a thirteen-year-old billionaire sweeps in wearing a fur coat and leading two wolfhounds. He weeps into a whole string of silk hankies and announces that the Kidds did it.

So they're carted off to jail with their know-it-all tour guide (who carries on giving the tour). From there the clues point north, towards the Arctic.

Reading it is like being told a story by a boy who can't go two minutes without a joke. Storm gives history lectures mid car chase. The twins have blazing rows that burn out in a minute because neither can remember what started them.

Your reader will pick up a surprising amount on the way, too (the lost Amber Room, the Fabergé eggs, who the Medicis were). The chapters are very short and most of them stop on an uh-oh.

It's worth knowing there are stun guns and a pistol early on. Soldiers tie Bick's wrists and the tour guide lists Russia's grimmest prisons. It's all played for laughs, but a child who takes threats to heart might not find it funny.

This is the fourth Treasure Hunters book, and Bick gives away how the earlier adventures turned out. If your reader hasn't met the Kidds yet, start with the first one.

What to read next

If the clue-by-clue chase is what they love, The Maze of Bones kicks off another. Amy and Dan Cahill are offered a million dollars each or a single clue, and some of the relatives they're up against are very rich and very nasty.